A Founding Story That Began with a Birthday Wish and a Typhoon：My Journey into HappyPower

教主
Dec 26, 2025
9 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

A personal essay by Easton

01 | The Curious Logic of Making a Wish

A very curious, yet entirely real story.

At the time, I was part of HappyPower as a community ambassador. During the May Day holiday, I joined the team at the Old Market Sour Bean Festival—drinking salted coffee, eating seafood rice, and experiencing, for the first time, a play-based water-pumping installation in the salt fields. After we returned, Dundan reached out and asked, “Are you free on May 5? Let’s get together offline.”

I felt an immediate sense of coincidence. That day happened to be my birthday, but I hesitated to say so. I didn’t want to create extra work for anyone—cakes, small gifts, that sort of thing—so I simply replied that I wasn’t available and asked if we could move it to the following day.

I’ve always liked birthdays. They feel like the one day that truly belongs to oneself, marked by a set of personal attributes and symbols: Taurus, the Beginning of Summer, fire element. It’s a day for reflection and for embracing oneself, for giving oneself a gift, and for seriously considering what one wants most. A moment with a sense of ritual. I often find myself thinking about birth and death, about where I come from and where I am going.

The next day—May 6, the day of the gathering—I received a message from Becca: “Jiao Zhu, come join the core team of HappyPower.”

The wish materialized with unsettling speed. It was fast enough to make me wonder whether the universe had been eavesdropping. Birthday mysticism seemed to be telling me, quite clearly: this was something I had to say yes to.

02 | What Lies Behind Mysticism Is a Category-17 Typhoon

After the typhoon, the entire city seemed to tilt into a state of post-apocalyptic disarray. Everything felt unfamiliar. People were confused, disoriented, and helpless.

Typhoon Yagi tore through the city with unparalleled destructive force. Like a venomous scorpion’s tail, its aftermath was just as brutal as its impact. Everyone was struck in some way—there were injuries and fear, but also action, intuition, and reflection.

On the day Yagi made landfall, I was at home on the 13th floor. I felt dizzy and nauseous from the panic—despite being someone who never gets seasick. The living room windows were sealed with tape, yet they still roared endlessly. I didn’t dare lie on the bed. The double-glazed bedroom windows warped under the pressure of the wind, and I was terrified that I might be flung into midair at any second. I spent the night huddled in the most solid part of the apartment—the narrow hallway without windows.

That fear turned out to be entirely justified. In the neighboring residential compound, one household had its living room security bars, windows, sofa, and television all ripped out and thrown outside.

Many residents in higher floors chose to set up tents in underground garages. My parents’ home is on the 25th floor, and they had planned to do the same. But the wind pressure in the corridor was so strong that even with two people pushing together, they couldn’t open the door.

The most devastating part of Yagi, however, was its tail. Urban areas lost power for three to seven days, while nearby towns experienced blackouts lasting anywhere from a week to more than thirty days. What followed were network outages, water cuts, blocked roads, and piles of uncollected garbage.

During that time, Becca and Melon were scavenging components and experimenting with retrofitting playground equipment so it could provide emergency electricity to local residents. Meanwhile, I was volunteering wherever help was needed. What had once been parallel paths eventually intersected—forced together by the typhoon.

From Parks and Neighborhoods to the Wildlife Reserve

I never expected my first visit to the Hainan Wildlife Park to happen under circumstances like this. The park could only be imagined through the devastation it had suffered, and the entire journey there was without signal, leaving us with a constant sense of vulnerability.

After we arrived cautiously, the first to greet us were the monkeys. Their welcome was unusually enthusiastic—grabbing bread, snatching eggs. Their demeanor appeared calm, but beneath that calm was a trace of tension. Fallen trees had crushed parts of their enclosures, allowing monkeys to run and jump freely throughout the park, even gathering in front of the cages of lions and American leopards to look on.

Most of the other animals were visibly lethargic. The giant pandas Gonggong and Shunshun, who had just celebrated their birthdays, were confined to indoor glass enclosures, visibly bored. Their favorite outdoor slides and pools were temporarily unusable due to the typhoon’s damage.

From Typhoon Yagi’s landfall on September 6 to the park’s clearance work on September 16, electricity at the wildlife park was never fully restored. The park relied on generator trucks for scheduled daily support. September in Hainan was stiflingly hot, and more than once we found ourselves thinking—if it were possible, we would willingly generate electricity by hand just to keep the animals going.

Clearing Debris: Collective Action of the Body

The process of clearing debris made the limits of human strength unmistakably clear, while at the same time constantly renewing our respect for it.

We moved like a colony of ants, circling pieces of “food” far larger than our own bodies. A single broken branch from a fallen tree could keep us busy for a long time. Gradually, a workflow emerged. Trunks thicker than an arm were cut clean at the base with chainsaws; branches no thicker than a finger were snapped by hand or dealt with using an axe. Large logs were lifted onto dump trucks first. Then thinner branches with dense foliage were stacked to fill the truck bed—one or two people receiving them from above, five or six passing them up from below. Straight branches were placed upright around the edges to increase the truck’s capacity, thicker pieces were thrown on top to compress the gaps, and finally fallen leaves were swept into piles and carried by hand into trash bags.

Chopping, snapping, lifting, hauling, twisting, picking up, pulling, throwing—by the end of the day, every muscle in my body, large and small, was aching, especially those rarely engaged in everyday workouts. For someone who wants to build strength but dislikes the gym, this felt like an unexpected reward. I even caught myself thinking: wasn’t this CrossFit in its most natural form?

CrossFit and “Outdoor Play”

Unlike bodybuilding, CrossFit does not take physical appearance as its primary goal, nor does it emphasize isolated muscle training. Instead, it is oriented toward developing specific, integrated physical capacities, making it a form of training that is closer to real-world conditions. What makes CrossFit particularly compelling is its ability to transform training from an individual activity into a collective one—charged with energy, engagement, and momentum.

03 | Can “Outdoor Play” Be Useful?

In the month following the typhoon, nearly all of my time was consumed by clearing debris and cleaning up. During the day, I worked in the park where I was assigned; in the evenings, I moved between my neighborhood and the surrounding community; on weekends, I assisted at the Hainan Wildlife Park. Among the obstacles we faced during cleanup, roughly 80 percent were trees that had once grown thick and tall. The rest included shattered glass, fallen billboards, and metal debris dropped from above.

The greatest enemy was exposure to the sun—the typhoon had stripped away almost all cloud cover. The second was sharp debris of every kind. Once injured, medical access was difficult, and the risk of infection was high.

It was under these conditions that I realized how the equipment once dismissed as merely “for outdoor play” had, in fact, become indispensable. The headlamp I bought for walking at night could run continuously for sixteen hours. The sun hat designed for rainforest trekking offered exceptional ventilation. Thick outdoor gloves allowed me to pick up broken glass directly and protected against thorns from fallen trees. The high-ankle design of trail shoes and hiking boots effectively prevented sprains, while their soles provided both slip resistance and puncture protection.

Outdoor enthusiasts are often met with a familiar comment: “You’ve got too much time on your hands.” Yet when I carried this equipment from morning until night, moving from my doorstep to the wildlife park forty kilometers away, what I felt was not only the fullness that comes from physical exertion, but a strong sense of rightness. Strength, endurance, resilience—and the gear built to withstand harsh conditions—are meant to be used precisely at moments like these.

If I Could Call My Past Self

If I could call my past self, what would I say?

I think I would say, “Leave the track earlier. Go outside and see what’s out there.”

So many things—if you don’t try them, how would you ever know?

The unknown brings fear. But facing fear directly is what generates strength.

On GAP and Entrepreneurship

My previous gap year began on my twenty-fifth birthday, when I submitted my resignation from a hospital. I started traveling in a state of poor physical and mental health. From someone who had barely traveled independently beyond going to university, I gradually became a backpacker—walking, hitchhiking, cycling.

I was once the kind of person whose lips would turn purple just from standing still during a flag-raising ceremony. Wearing a 200-yuan Decathlon jacket, I stood on Tiger Leaping Stone. In a borrowed down jacket, I crossed the violent winds and snow of Mount Kailash. I didn’t know how to shift gears on a bicycle, yet I stubbornly rode a single gear all the way around Qinghai Lake. I used to hunch my back for years out of resentment toward my own height; eventually, I learned to appreciate the strength in my legs.

I completed my first Spartan race, my first triathlon, and my first open-water swim. Fear never disappeared, but it was increasingly accompanied by a sense of wildness and ambition. I tasted something sweet in these experiences, and began to want more—to explore the boundaries of my life from every possible angle. My criterion became simple: whatever I chose had to be something I could face without regret, even in death.

That previous gap reshuffled my life. It was about seeing the world and seeing others. This time, I want to see myself.

“Unemployment” and the Absurdity of Reality

Entering a startup team without a conventional job—and becoming, in effect, “unemployed”—is deeply unsettling. Yet reality is equally absurd. I couldn’t find a job because I am someone who genuinely loves working.

I love work in the same way I love life itself. I want to be in fields I believe in, to work alongside people I respect, and to be part of projects where effort is not wasted and meaning can be felt. All of this sounds extravagant, even naïve.

But my previous gap year spoiled me. Amid the stench of bodies at six sky burials in Sertar, during long hikes along sheer cliffs, I came to understand both the impermanence of life and the insignificance of the individual. The only thing one can truly choose is the path under one’s feet. I want a path that I would not regret, even if it were to end abruptly at any step.

From the beaks of vultures, I learned the nature of impermanence. From heaps of bleached bones, the impulse to detach arose. From the stench of decay, I grasped the suffering embedded in cyclical existence. And in the cold forests of burial grounds, I came to understand the truth of life.

The Philosophy of HappyPower

Happy is the cleanest form of energy in the world.

The essence of the HappyPower revolution is not technological iteration, but the transformation of humanity’s oldest emotion into a programmable source of energy. It carries both a high-level, forward-looking international vision and a grounded sense of humanistic care. It responds directly to the Sustainable Development Goals, while also resonating with a deeply rooted ethical principle: to care for the elderly as one’s own elders, and to care for children as one’s own children.

This is not an elite discourse. It makes room for the childlike capacities of adults and recognizes the rights of children. Language is often inadequate—and at times even conceals forms of violence—but the kinetic force of play can cut across language, age, and even species, becoming a baseline of life itself.

As an ancient text puts it: when words are no longer sufficient, we sigh; when sighing is no longer enough, we sing; when singing is no longer enough, our hands begin to dance and our feet begin to move.

When emotion and movement converge, healing becomes possible. So does connection—to the world, to others, and to sources of inspiration and value.

Who Are the People of HappyPower?

HappyPower does not settle for the ordinary. It is bold, genuinely playful, and widely resonant. Often, it requires very little explanation. Passersby, listeners drawn in by a story, and even those approaching from a business perspective find themselves moved—and liking it—almost instinctively.

Every startup carries risk, but HappyPower holds the conditions for success. It has a soul, a backbone, and a sense of life.

What kind of people does this attract? People who can see the darkness of the world and still choose to generate light. This must come from courage—not from anger, resentment, avoidance, collapse, or the hope of being rescued.

They may look at résumés and past experience, but what matters more is what a person radiates: vitality and distinctiveness. Recognition of a good idea takes the form of a deep, uncoerced commitment—not persuasion, but attraction. People are drawn in by the idea itself, and join the conversation and the work of building it.

Here, there is praise for good ideas, but no preaching and no self-display. Just a group of sincere people, ignited by sincere ideas, dreaming and building together—bound by a shared devotion to play and creation, and by the collective joy of shaping something meaningful.